December 16, 2007
Aranyaprathet - Sisophon: Hello Cambodia
After lots of walking in Bangkok, a boat ride on the klongs and now a train ride, it's time to finally get on our bikes. It's only six kilometers to the border, the air is still cool and the roads are still good.
The border is an experience, fascinating and stress. Hundreds and hundreds of Thais are waiting to cross into Cambodia: men, women and young children pulling huge carts laden with vegetables, fruits, giant bundles and sacks with other goods, I don't know what. Thai citizens and non-Thai citizens have separate entry gates and we are through after a short wait. On the other side there is heavy foot traffic in the other direction, day laborers going to Thailand. I'm itching to take pictures but I suspect that you're not allowed to photograph the border here in no-man's land between the Thai and Cambodian customs.
After another 300 meters we reach the Cambodian customs, fill in our entry forms (we already have our visas which I guess was convenient after all), get many stamps in our passports and are allowed to enter Cambodia.
In Poipet, the town on the Cambodian side, the road is a mess of potholes and dust, poverty is evident everywhere, what was orderly in Thailand is chaotic here. Coming from Thailand, I feel like a rich kid who has been thrown out onto the streets to learn survival.
The first step is to find a bank with an ATM. We don't yet realize that we could easily get along with Thai baht. We can only get dollars and with our dollars we hasten to find an exchange. Again we are ignorant. We aren't aware that we can pay for almost everything with dollars. We find an exchange and emerge with fists full of Cambodian riell: 10,000 riell are 2 Euros. That's too many zeros for me and I'm already confused.
The next thing is to get something to eat. We were too anxious to cross the border to stop for breakfast. We have what everyone is having, a bowl of noodle soup with some dubious looking pieces of meat floating around in it. It wouldn't be hard to spend the whole day in Poipet taking pictures, but we're eager to get underway as it's getting hotter by the minute.
It is now past nine, the sun is hot and the road is terrible. I had been warned this would be the case, I know, but I guess I just had to see it for myself. We stick to a kind of track on the edge used by all two-wheeled vehicles which skirts the potholes and rocks and deeper dust while keeping you out of range of the buses, pick-ups, cars and trucks. The air is thick with dust, I've masked my nose and mouth with a scarf as do most other people out on the road, and the thermometer climbs to 41 degrees centigrade. We have a headwind. My bicycle computer has stopped working, that was my first frustration of the day, but it's just as well I don't see how slow we are.
The road is straight as an arrow, the county is flat, there are rice fields to either side of the road, occasionally a tiny stand selling cold drinks, once in a while a tree close enough to the roadside to provide shade, and nothing else.
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About midway a sealed surface provides some relief. Some kilometers before we reach Sisophon, where we want to sleep, we see a sign for a guesthouse and a guesthouse has never been so welcome as today. We're quite a sight, our clothes and hair are stiff with sweat and dust, not to mention the shape our panniers and bikes are in. But we're given a room, it's clean and has hot water - we've been saved.
We are sent to the stand next door for an evening meal. Aside from a few locals watching tv, we are the only guests. Neither in the guesthouse nor in the restaurant does anyone speak English. But when I mimic eating, the man nods and disappears. Did he understand and what happens now? But there is some flurry in the kitchen and after a while a meal appears, kind of western style: fried eggs, meat, potatoes and ketchup.
We sit next to the road and the traffic is still heavy, mostly trucks and buses now, and in their headlights the air is clouded with dust.
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